Book Image

Implementing Cisco UCS Solutions - Second Edition

By : Anuj Modi, Prasenjit Sarkar
Book Image

Implementing Cisco UCS Solutions - Second Edition

By: Anuj Modi, Prasenjit Sarkar

Overview of this book

Cisco Unified Computer System (UCS) is a powerful solution for modern data centers and is responsible for increasing efficiency and reducing costs. This hands-on guide will take you through deployment in Cisco UCS. Using real-world examples of configuring and deploying Cisco UCS components, we’ll prepare you for the practical deployments of Cisco UCS data center solutions. If you want to develop and enhance your hands-on skills with Cisco UCS solutions, this book is certainly for you. We start by showing you the Cisco UCS equipment options then introduce Cisco UCS Emulator so you can learn and practice deploying Cisco UCS components. We’ll also introduce you to all the areas of UCS solutions through practical configuration examples. Moving on, you’ll explore the Cisco UCS Manager, which is the centralized management interface for Cisco UCS. Once you get to know UCS Manager, you’ll dive deeper into configuring LAN, SAN, identity pools, resource pools, and service profiles for the servers. You’ll also get hands-on with administration topics including backup, restore, user’s roles, and high availability cluster configuration. Finally, you will learn about virtualized networking, third-party integration tools, and testing failure scenarios. By the end of this book, you’ll know everything you need to know to rapidly grow Cisco UCS deployments in the real world.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

VEM data plane


There is a 1:1 mapping between hypervisor and VEM. VEM replaces the virtual switch by performing the following functions:

  • Advanced networking and security
  • Switching between directly attached VMs
  • Uplinking through physical NICs

You can install only one version of VEM on an ESXi host at any given point in time. Please have a look at the following diagram for more details:

VEM functions

The following are the various functions of VEM:

  • Advanced networking and security
  • Switching between directly attached VMs
  • Uplink to the rest of the network

Unlike conventional Nexus switches, each line card has its own media access control (MAC) table that goes through the same process as conventional switches:

  • Ingress: Traffic that comes inbound towards the interfaces of the N1KV switch
  • L2 lookup: A process that handles the packets after the parser engine has parsed the initial packet delivery
  • Egress: Traffic goes out of the interfaces of the N1KV switch